


In Search Of Pain

by yhibiki



Category: DRAMAtical Murder
Genre: Character Study, Community: kink_bingo, M/M, Painplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-10 16:42:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/468454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yhibiki/pseuds/yhibiki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noiz can't feel pain, so he chases any facsimile of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Search Of Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my painplay square in kink_bingo. All the stuff about Rhyme and Noiz's backstory are made up, it has no basis in canon. (If I had a say in it, Rhyme wouldn't be as confusing.)

Everybody else is doing Rhyme, so he figures he might as well too. Some Japanese MMO with a lot of different local servers. It's got him more curious than anything else, because everybody talks about how _real_ it feels. Some people think it's too real, and there are websites formed by concerned parents who think it's too dangerous for children.

His parents don't give a shit what their teenage son is up to.

He sets up an account and skims through the installation instructions. _Requires an allmate to play_ , it tells him. He frowns. The only allmate he has is a set of cubes his brother snuck into the room. He pulls them out of the drawer though and downloads the required software.

_Rhyme is a virtual reality in which players can roleplay, collect items, and fight virtual battles. Currently, battles are restricted to local servers, though who knows what future expansions might bring!_

He scoffs at that. Sounds fairly old school, if it can't even handle cross-server interaction. But okay, whatever. He starts up the game.

A second image seems to superimpose itself in front of his eyes. He turns his head, but it extends everywhere. His room is clearly visible underneath, but if he isn't looking for it, he can see a vast field. 

A menu pops up in front of him. 

_Welcome! I see this is your first time in Rhyme. Will you tell me your name?_

He says his regular internet handle out loud, then has to fix the spelling because the game apparently knows some preset words. _Noiz._

The next step is character creation, and he's stumped right until he spots Konnie nibbling on her celery. So he gives his character a rabbit head, and decides to use celery green as his color. He knows he shouldn't, but he picks up Konnie and sets her down on the table so he can watch her while the game goes through the loading screens.

_Your allmate needs a name too!_

Noiz looks at the allmate in his hand, which has a bunny face drawn on it in permanent marker. "Rabbit," he says, and the game tells him that name is unavailable.

He goes through the same name in all the languages he knows, until finally he gets frustrated and just says "Psuedo-Rabbit" in Japanese: Usagimodoki. The game lets it go through. Fine. The cube barely looks like a rabbit anyway.

There's more menus, and Noiz is getting bored of it already. He's about to quit out, when the first warning pops up: _Please be advised that Rhyme uses advanced technology to simulate pain within the game world. We recommend that people with medical conditions consult their doctors before engaging in Rhyme._

Noiz's hand shakes as he pets Konnie. That can't be right. It's impossible to simulate pain. Everybody has tried. The doctors have tried, his parents have tried, the maid has tried. Konnie tries, sometimes, when he picks her up and she's unhappy about it. His hand and wrist have tiny bunny bite scars; one is harder than the others, where it got mildly infected and went untreated until the maid noticed.

"Should I keep doing this?" he asks Konnie. She sniffs at his hand, then rubs her head against it.

Of course he goes through with it. He's burning with curiosity now. He desperately needs to know if this, out of everything that everybody has tried, from nerve inductors to genetic treatments, could be the solution for him.

His lone allmate--he gives it the form of a bunny too--waddles along beside him. It's interesting how the game is interpreting his brain signals, shifting the landscape around him to make it look like he's walking. There's a message about how some people get dizzy, and how it can take a while to get used to the program, but Noiz doesn't feel any different.

The in-game fire he sees isn't much more than artfully arranged polygons, which makes his chest tighten. No pain, no heat, no whatever it is that people feel whenever they touch fire. If this game is simulating reality, it isn't doing it for him.

 _Oh no! A monster is attacking!_

Noiz spots the enemy encounter, and he has to give credit for the realistic models. It looks just like a miniature lion. His allmate gets into battle stance, which is somewhat cute considering it's an anthropomorphic bunny. Though he supposes his own in-game avatar doesn't look that different.

_Tell your allmate to attack! All allmates have a standard "tackle" attack._

Noiz gives the order, and the bunny rushes forward to tackle the monster. The monster recoils and growls, mimicking pain.

_Good job! But just attacking won't always work. Tell your allmate to defend._

The bunny gets into defensive stance just as the small lion attacks. There's some text that pops up in front of his eyes, but Noiz isn't paying attention.

He felt that.

It isn't-- it isn't bad, not how he thought pain would be from the way everybody described it. They always say it's something to be avoided, something bad. But all it does is spark a new sensation across his mind. Dim, not fully there, but more than he's ever felt before.

He wants more of it.

\--

There's no going back after that. He throws himself into Rhyme, makes new profiles and challenges high leveled players just for the sake of that wonderful feeling. He spends so much time in Rhyme that even his parents notice, but all they do is make the maid feed him more.

His favorite profile is still his first one. It has what he considers his "real" name, and he's grown fond of the strange cube allmate. He buys more of them, paints them all in green and black and spends hours collecting in-game cash so he can customize them as he wants.

He chases after the pain in the real world too, more than he ever did before. He stabs a needle through the back of his hand, but it does nothing. He gives himself an ear piercing, and that doesn't help either. On his sixteenth birthday, he sneaks out to a piercing parlor in town and gets his tongue pierced. That's even better than Rhyme, it's so much more real, but it gets infected and he doesn't want to risk losing the only part of his body he can feel, so he forgets getting more piercings or bifurcating it. He's happy with just the one, once the infection clears. He plays with it constantly, lets it clink against his teeth and doesn't care that he cracks a few of them.

\--

People ask him if he misses his family, and he shrugs. Not particularly. They talk about how painful it is to be away from loved ones, and Noiz stares impassively. He wishes his pet bunny were still alive, but she died of old age and there just isn't any point to going to Germany to be with the other people he grew up with.

He gets more piercings instead, in even more exotic places, and it is a little bit nice to have people be impressed with his pain tolerance; he never tells them he can't feel the pain at all.

\--

The pain he feels when Aoba rushes to protect him is different from anything else he's ever felt before, and he doesn't know how to describe it. It isn't the dull muted sparks he gets from Rhyme, and it's not the faded memory of his tongue piercing or the infection.

It's a pain which makes his chest tighten and his heart beat faster. It's a pain which makes his eyes water.

It's a pain which makes him want to laugh.

\--

When he's finally discharged from the hospital, his body is still aching from bruises. He still doesn't understand why people shy away from this sensation, because the first thing he does when he's at home is press down on all the faintly yellow spots on his skin and hissing at the sharp burn.

He does experiments too, more than what the doctors did at the hospital. He steps into the furo with the water turned too-hot, he uses a fork to press tiny marks into his thigh. He turns on the stove and lets his hand hover over the hot plate for as long as he can bear.

He tugs on his piercings. 

It's ridiculous how hard it all makes him, and how quickly. It used to take him a good fifteen, twenty minutes to get even half an erection, but now it seems like everything is setting him off. It feels so good to stroke his shaft and tug on the hafada piercing at the same time, that amazing combination of pain-pressure. 

\--

"Harder," he tells Aoba, and he doesn't tell him that his ribs aren't quite healed, and that every little movement sends a flare through his chest.

Aoba is so self-conscious of causing pain, even when Noiz asks him to do it on purpose. He seems to understand that light nips to Noiz's cock are welcome, but so far none of it has gone past Noiz's tolerance. He doesn't even know how high his threshold is, just that they aren't there yet.

In contrast, Aoba shies away from all pain, and Noiz has to relearn to be gentle. This is like petting Konnie, only not, because now that he knows what pain feels like he has an even harder time fathoming the aversion to it. He wants to make Aoba feel the same, even as he knows that Aoba wouldn't appreciate it.

Aoba's nails scrape across his balls, and Noiz lets out a cry. "Again."

There's a brief moment of hesitation before Aoba repeats the movement, and between that and his teeth pulling at his foreskin just on the other side of too-rough, Noiz loses control. Aoba ends up with Noiz's come all over his face, his cheeks flushed red.

"Sorry," Noiz mumbles; his staying power is shot.

Aoba shakes his head. "No, um," he pauses, scrapes some of the come off his faces and licks it off his finger, "I kind of liked it."

Noiz blinks for a moment, not comprehending. He hates the feeling of spunk on his face, has always hated it. It's one of the few things he told his past partners he wouldn't do. He can't imagine liking it.

That's probably how Aoba feels about the pain, he realizes, and somehow he can't stop himself from chuckling. "I'll do it again in a bit if you bite harder."

"Perverted brat," Aoba mumbles, but he's happy enough to let Noiz suck him off; Noiz doesn't use his teeth.

\--

Noiz isn't going to quit Rhyme, but it's different now, with Aoba at his side. He doesn't need to seek out higher-leveled players because he doesn't need to find a cheap imitation of pain. He has the real thing.

But he has something better now too. Noiz breathes in Aoba's scent, and his cheeks hurt with how hard he's grinning.


End file.
